Chinese peptide labs funded with cryptocurrencies are thriving

He was dead quietly Hide passive facial recognition codes on over 50 million phonesWIRED reported this week that it’s inside a companion app that pairs with its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. If activated, the feature – known internally as NameTag – will allow the wearer to recognize people in front of them by matching captured faces to a gallery of biometrics on the user’s device. It’s the same type of technology that Meta said it was moving away from in 2021, after paying billions of dollars to settle biometric privacy lawsuits in Texas and Illinois.

Meanwhile, XAI is asking a federal judge to do so Four people forced to file a lawsuit against the company over deep nude images created by Grok to drop their pseudonyms and litigate under their real names — including one plaintiff who alleges a chatbot was used to fabricate sexual images of her when she was a child. Plaintiffs say they would drop the lawsuit sooner rather than submit to online harassment and defamation from Musk’s supporters. However, xAI’s lawyers claim that since the deepfake will remain under seal, there is “nothing inherently stigmatizing” about naming the people in it.

Google A new Android feature is rolling out this week Targeting a wave of AI-powered impersonation scams that help fraudsters impersonate a familiar number and clone a person’s voice. It is packaged with Google Dialer and ships to phones running Android 12 or later, and pings the caller’s device for a silent encrypted handshake. If the call is fake, Android will flag it and remove the contact’s image from the screen, but only if both parties are on Google Dialer, leaving iPhones out of the picture.

WIRED also reported this week that the Manhattan Institute — the same right-wing think tank that engineered the broken windows policy of the 1990s and the Trump administration’s anti-DEI campaign — is now… Model shopping legislation to turn minor protest-related crimes into felonies Under a new theory called “civilian terrorism.”

Researchers have detailed a new clever browser side-channel attack called FROST that fingerprints other tabs — and sometimes apps on your device — by… Measure how long it takes to read from a sandboxed file on your SSD. The attack is powered entirely using JavaScript and feeds timing traces through a neural network trained on the I/O signatures of common programs. There is no evidence yet of anyone using it in the wild.

And that’s not all. Every week we round up security and privacy news that we don’t cover in detail ourselves. Click on the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

Dietary supplements known as peptides — chains of amino acids that promise to help those who smear, ingest or inject them achieve everything from weight loss to skin rejuvenation — have become a largely unregulated pharmaceutical sub-industry. So, its growth is clearly supported by cryptocurrencies, which are often sent directly to Chinese laboratories that sell these mysterious drugs.

Cryptocurrency tracking firm Chainalogy this week Published an analysis From cryptocurrency flows to peptide sellers, a gray market that the company now measures at more than $100 million annually and growing. Specifically, Chainalysis found that some of the same Chinese laboratories that previously sold fentanyl precursors have now shifted to manufacturing and selling peptides. Chainalysis believes this shift is designed to capitalize on a wave “Looks great” The social media hype that drove peptide sales — and to avert the risk of crackdowns on opioid manufacturers.

AI can do all sorts of things if you just ask it: program an app, enhance your photos, or even hack President Barack Obama’s Instagram account. since dead Announced in March Backing up its accounts will be increasingly automated using artificial intelligence, including functions such as updating your password, and hackers have found they can exploit the tool to reset passwords and take over the accounts of even high-profile users. Among the victims was A Quoted by 404 Medianamely Obama, the first sergeant in the US Space Force, and the cosmetics chain Sephora. Meta says the issue has now been fixed and affected accounts have been secured. But the wave of acquisitions illustrates the risks of hollowing out AI security functions — especially at companies like Meta, which has publicly touted its holistic approach to adopting AI across the company.

When Anthropic Artificial Intelligence Inc Rolled that it Powerful mythology tool For a select group of organizations to test, it raised eyebrows by including the US National Security Agency on that initial access list. Legends, after all, are told able to find Previously hidden security vulnerabilities are being exploited in software with alarming speed, raising concerns that they could be used for automated mass surveillance and cyberattacks. But the NSA also has a defense mission, and initial reports suggest the agency may be using Anthropic to find bugs in popular software used by Americans — like Microsoft — with the goal of better securing them. However, the Financial Times now reports that Anthropic is helping the NSA move forward with its use of Mythos, deploying Anthropic engineers to the agency to help it learn to use the AI ​​tool, including offensive hacking. FT was unable to confirm that Mythos was used in active hacking operations. But given the increasing use of artificial intelligence in state-sponsored hacking, it would be surprising if the United States did not join the field of automated cyber intrusions in the modern era.

US President Donald Trump has chosen Bill Bolt to serve as interim Director of National Intelligence. Replaces Bolt Tulsi Gabbardwho recently resigned from the role due to her husband’s health problems. Trump said he is considering appointing other people to the permanent job, but that confirmation process could take months.

As acting director, Bolte will be responsible for the entire US intelligence community, coordinating 18 different agencies including the CIA and the National Security Agency.